As archeological excavations uncover increasingly revealing finds, the study of cosmetics is coming into its own, no longer as a sideline of costume or aesthetics, but as an independent field, the implications of which extend into the study of rituals, fashions, botany, mineralogy, chemical synthesis, long-distance trade and cultural exchanges, in other words all the essentials of the development of early civilizations. The excavations on the Iranian plateau and in the Bactrian-Margian Archaeological Complex have pushed back the frontiers of the first use of cosmetics to the fourth millennium BCE, even earlier than recorded for ancient Egypt